Consumers have in recent times been desirous of eating wholesome and nutritious snack foods. Milk containing puddings have long been considered nutritious and wholesome foods. Consumers are, however, requiring that the foods they eat, particularly snack food and dessert items, be essentially ready-to-eat. Thus, the amounts of cooked puddings and even instant puddings prepared in the home environment has been decreasing in recent years.
To fill the desire of consumers for pudding dessert or snack items which require no preparation on the part of the consumer, there exists ready-to-eat puddings which are usually marketed in single-service portions. Initially these products were marketed as shelf-stable canned products. These canned puddings which have been subjected to a retort step during processing do not possess the texture and flavor which consumers associate with home-cooked pudding. More recently, single-service portions of refrigerated, aseptically-packaged pudding products have entered the market.
A process and formulations for preparing aseptically-packaged pudding is described in commonly-assigned, U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,075 to Joseph et al. This patent is hereby incorporated by reference. The Joseph et al. patent describes the preparation of aseptically-packaged pudding which has a creamy texture comparable to cooked pudding and which contains milk solids, fat and a relatively low level (below 5%) of a chemically-modified food starch. This low starch level results in pudding formulations which have a relatively low on-line viscosity.
On-line viscosity is the viscosity exhibited by the pudding formulation during and shortly after the heat treatment step which is an integral part of aseptic processing. This low on-line viscosity and low starch level is desirable in terms of being able to cool the heated pudding in fixed plate heat exchangers as called for in the aforementioned patent; however, it has been found that the on-line pudding viscosity may be undesirably low. A low on-line viscosity can result in splashing or sloshing of the pudding formulation at the package filling station. If pudding splashes onto the rim of the package, a hemetic seal between the package and subsequently applied flexible lid material will not be formed. It has also been found that a low on-line viscosity makes it difficult to clearly layer differing (e.g., different colored) pudding formulations. Well defined or clean layers are desirable for producing parfait-type pudding products, especially when such puddings are to be packaged in clear or translucent plastic cups.
It would of course be possible to increase on-line viscosity by adding starch to the formulation or by making the pudding extremely cold during the filling step; however, both of these solutions can produce textures in the ready-to-eat pudding that may be considered undesirable.
It is therefore a object of this invention to produce an aseptically-packaged pudding which has a desirable pudding texture, as consumed, and which has an on-line viscosity which is high enough to prevent excessive splashing and low enough to be cooled with fixed plate heat exchangers.
It is a further object of this invention to permit the production of layered, aseptically-packaged desserts where a clear line of demarcation exist between contiguous pudding layers such that, when differently-colored puddings are layered in a clear, plastic cup, well-defined layers are observed.